Love is each the tenderest mirror and the cruelest. How a lot and the way properly we present up for love displays what we imagine ourselves worthy of. What we need displays what we imagine we deserve. What we lengthy for displays each our limitations and our stressed craving to transcend them. In love’s mirror, we’re revealed to ourselves, stripped of the ego’s flattering self-image, our vulnerabilities and inadequacies laid naked — a revelation laced with the elegant, each stunning and terrifying to the bone.
Easy methods to stay with the transcendent terror of affection is what the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, priest, and musician George Herbert (April 3, 1593–March 1, 1633) explores in one in all his poems — poems composed within the hope that they could “flip to the benefit of any dejected poor soul.” Reaching throughout house and time the best way solely artwork can, the poem’s remaining line went on to encourage the ultimate line of Derek Walcott’s very good “Love After Love,” composed almost 4 centuries later.
LOVE
by George HerbertLove bade me welcome; but my soul drew again,
Responsible of mud and sin.
However quick-eyed Love, observing me develop slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d something.“A visitor,” I reply’d, “worthy to be right here:”
Love stated, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my expensive,
I can’t look on Thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes however I?”“Fact, Lord; however I’ve marr’d them: let my disgrace
Go the place it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “Who bore the blame?”
“My expensive, then I’ll serve.”
“It’s essential to sit down,” says Love, “and style my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
Complement with David Whyte’s poem “The Truelove” and Robert Graves’s “Advice to Lovers,” then revisit the nice Zen trainer Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of love’s loss.
